Last in the Tin Bath

by David Lloyd

  Part of my Twitter drive has been to uncover a millionaire, an entrepreneur; even a bull-shitteur will do as long as it’s one with readies. The challenge is: give us a million pounds and it can be your team, your club. Let’s see what we can do with a million pounds in the bank. Why do I do all this? Because it’s about the community and community is important to me. The amount of work Accrington Stanley do in schools through the club’s Trust and Academy is incredible, yet it’s not having the desired knock-on effect.

  It’s a unique club, the club that wouldn’t die, and to that end I could not resist tweeting Russell Crowe when it became public that he might be interested in buying Leeds United off Massimo Cellino, after he’d bought his beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league club when they were on the brink. We haven’t got rabbits but I know a few folk who keep ferrets, if only he would get back to me. Stanley, I told him, were tailor-made for him. ‘Stick two fingers up to Yorkshire and tell them you are coming over to Accrington,’ was the gist of it. I thought our gladiatorial nature might appeal to him too.

  While out in Australia for the 2015 World Cup, I happened to be in a restaurant in Woolloomooloo, the suburb in which Crowe lives. I tried to lure him out, with messages like: ‘I know you’re at the end of the road. Why not come out and have a curry?’ He must have been away filming because he didn’t reply. I would happily have treated him to some poppadoms. If he had bought Nicole Kidman with him, I might have even stretched to a bottle of Prosecco.

  My love of watching Accrington burns as strong now as it did in 1953 when my dad took me to my first game and stood me on a brick so that I could see. Football always carries the potential frustration of losing, but crikey, our lads give it their all to avoid such an outcome. They don’t leave anything out there on the pitch, as they say, and not one of them rolls around on the floor. You see some of these Barcelona lads go down if a hair gets knocked out of place and fear they will be in intensive care all week. It gets a little bit more feisty in League Two than it does in El Clasico, or as we call it in Lancashire, t’derby.

  As well as passion, there is a history to cherish. We believe we’ve got a wonderfully named football club, a club with great tradition. This town, with a population of 35,000, provided one of the twelve founder members of the Football League. These days the place is quite different to how it was in 1888, but regardless of the era, community is everything to me, and clearly to a man like Ilyas Khan too.

  My affinity for the area played a part in my turning down the chance to move down to Essex, at the age of thirty-six, to become their second XI coach. While the job appealed, because they were one of the most successful clubs around, I felt it was probably just a bit too close to my playing career, and uprooting the family to move 200 miles away just didn’t feel right. Accrington is where we were from, and so I continued to plough on with my work both at the club and with the local youngsters.

  I would continue to play for Accrington for the next six years but knew it was time to call it the day when I snapped my Achilles tendon while batting against Rishton. By now, I was combining playing at weekends and a couple of days with Cumberland in midweek, with umpiring. While I had no great desire to spend my next twenty years as a man in a white coat, it did give me the chance to keep a link to the county game that had been my home for so long. A telephone conversation with Lord’s, to assess my chances, returned a favourable result, as although they had no space on the full list, they made me a reserve, meaning that I could expect university matches as well as last-minute call-ups in case of illness and injury.

  However, when David Evans was sidelined on a permanent basis midway through the 1985 season, I found that my part-time role was a thing of the past. I could now consider myself to be back on the county cricket circuit permanently. To get on the umpires’ list of 2015 involves a much more exhaustive process – interested candidates have to prove their commitment over a period of time in local cricket before they can even make it as a reserve. So it might be a surprise to learn that thirty years ago there were no such demands, qualifications or training required. Lengthy service in the game as a first-class player was seen as a sufficient apprenticeship.

  As an ex-county captain, I possessed an added advantage. I knew how a game should be conducted and, having been on the other side of the fence as recently as two years earlier, knew how players thought. As an official, getting on the same wavelength is so important. Knowledge of the laws is one thing, but I always found the understanding of the struggles that can exist on the field, the frustrations it can entail, while maintaining a sense of humour, were essential ingredients of the job.

  That sense of humour came in handy when I stood in my first match. It involved Essex, the club I had recently turned down, in a fixture with Cambridge University at Fenner’s. John Lever, the former England bowler, whose practical joking could prove almost as devastating as his left-arm swing, opened from my end and his first ball caused a real commotion as a relatively slow half-volley literally exploded onto the bat of the Cambridge opener. Only it wasn’t a ball at all; the silly sod had sent down an orange. Some might not have taken it that well, but I was never an officious type during my three years as an umpire and had to laugh.

  Naturally, there were others who I didn’t see eye to eye with, most notably Peter Roebuck, who gave me a mark of one out of ten during his duties as Somerset captain. It came at the conclusion of a match at The Oval in which I gave a rare rebuke. With Surrey batting, he left the field without informing me of his desire to do so, leading to an exchange between me and the twelfth man who replaced him, and me dispatching the poor bloke back to the dressing room with a message to his captain to request his leave of absence before walking off. It led to Roebuck gesturing from the balcony that he had hurt his hand.

  Generally, I was happy to be on the road, even though it meant long hours and poor pay, because it offered a reprise of my previous career. Some of my colleagues found ways to make their devotion more cost effective, with Ray Julian employed to do odd jobs at Leicester’s Grace Road during the winter, and others such as David Constant and Alan Whitehead travelling the country in caravans to avoid the cost of hotel bills. Thankfully, remuneration is better now and Graham is carrying on the family tradition, having been upgraded to the full list from its reserve for the 2014 season.

  My only grievance with the modern method of umpiring is the 65-years-old age cap that dictates officials are forced to retire. While I understand the reasoning – to help the development of their younger colleagues – someone like Peter Willey is too good a man to be lost to the game, as he appeared to be on losing his appeal to continue. He has an incredible depth of knowledge from half a century in the game, and during the flux in English cricket in early 2015 I considered him to be an excellent candidate in any new regime. Here was someone who has seen the county and international games at first hand, as both a player and umpire, and over the past decade had kept a close eye on the best emerging talents of the county scene. In my view, he would make an excellent selector.

  Although not flush during the 1980s, my public speaking bookings were bringing in a few quid, and I was also earning fees as a commentator on early satellite television coverage. There were some irregular bookings with BBC radio too. I found this stimulating and rewarding, moving in a slightly different direction in my life but retaining my association with cricket. My jack-of-all-trades working life had taken me down another avenue.

  Being back on the county treadmill meant I kept in touch with some significant characters of my playing past, most notably Keith Andrew who along with Les Lenham had run the advanced coaching course at Lilleshall during my off seasons with Lancashire. Keith was not only the national director of coaching at that time, he was also chief executive of the NCA, the body responsible for all non-first-class cricket. I was already putting my coaching credentials to the test with the up-and-comers of Accrington when Keith asked me, in a phone call out of the blue, whether I would be intereste
d in coaching at some of the NCA’s junior sessions.

  Keith, an old-school wicketkeeper with a notorious ability to talk batsmen out during his time with Northamptonshire, was known to me earlier in my career because, as a son of Oldham, he had served on the Lancashire committee during my captaincy tenure. I willingly took up his offer, but at that stage I could not have imagined that he had just set me on a pathway that would result in me becoming England coach a decade later.

  In those early days Keith, who was based at Lord’s, would turn up to spy on my sessions – literally so, as his party piece would be to put the rolled-up newspaper he habitually carried to his eye and focus on me behind the stumps or on the batsman at the other end. Soon, I acted as a floating coach, supplementing the four permanent national coaches that the NCA employed, and was instrumental in trying to break down the clunky, archaic barriers that existed between the NCA and the English Schools’ Association. Change was so evidently necessary but, as in most examples when this is the case, it was met with reticence.

  Arguably, what broke it down was the launch of Kwik Cricket, an innovation that also raised my profile in terms of coaching. Keith and I shared the belief that there was no hook to pull kids into our sport and this version of the game would hopefully change all that. The Kwik Cricket road shows took the sport around the country to primary schools, with the initial target being to visit 500 schools a year. With more and more becoming affiliated, however, it was pretty obvious that this would no longer be a part-time passion and I was therefore in effect now an employee of the TCCB.

  Another extension of these links was that I suddenly became closer to the England age-group teams. Initially, the Under-15s became my primary focus. That is an age when young boys become men and there were some very mature players in terms of their physicality – Marcus Trescothick being a standout. By that stage, courtesy of his love of sausages and crisps, he was on the way to earning his nickname Banger. Arguably, the best player I encountered was Robin Weston, a batsman who none of his peers could dismiss and one I felt would go on to play Test cricket. However, his progress reminded me somewhat of Alan Thomas, the mega talent of my youth who failed to fulfil his enormous potential. Weston just didn’t appear to have the motivation, certainly not to the level of Trescothick, and although a subsequent move from Durham to Derbyshire did suggest he was giving it a go, his career came to a premature end.

  Involvement with the England Under-19 team showed me that while there was huge talent it was not always matched by the same levels of application. Our young cricketers, like their contemporaries in other fields, were as concerned with enjoying themselves at night as they were at gaining recognition for their performance during the day. While it needed a culture shift for these attitudes to change, being a father myself helped me recognise that these lads were no different to any average teenager. They would make mistakes and when told off look at the floor or stare into space.

  Only once did a transgression result in anything more serious. It was on the 1996 tour of Zimbabwe, when we all hopped on the bus for a drive to Harare, only for the hotel manager to abort our journey before it began. There were, he said, some unpaid bills. That could be rectified soon enough, if only he would share the names of the individuals concerned. Unfortunately, neither Mick Jagger nor Cliff Richard, or Archbishop Desmond Tutu for that matter, happened to be on board that day, and so myself and Graham Saville, the tour manager, forced the entire squad back indoors to discipline the transgressors. As is often the case in this kind of situation, one lad who shall remain nameless took the rap and was warned about his future conduct. But the threat of being sent home, although directed at him, was made to the entire team.

  Meanwhile, back in England, the combination of all these varied posts – which since 1993 had included the position of first-team coach at Lancashire – and the demands they took on my time led to the unfortunate but inevitable breakdown of my marriage to Susan. Time has healed, and thankfully we all remain on friendly terms but such were the demands of work that it literally took over at the expense of everything else. It was a dreadful chapter of my life, and the worst part of it on a personal level without doubt.

  I left the family house in Accrington and had nowhere to go. So there I was, Lancashire coach and homeless. With nowhere to live, it meant I dossed with Pete Marron in the groundsman’s house at Old Trafford for a fortnight before I got a flat. I was almost itinerant; trapped in a vicious circle. To get through the anguish of it all, I just immersed myself in work; every hour I was awake I was working somewhere. Punch drunk, if truth be told, but I reasoned that was the only way.

  CHAPTER 10

  Flippin’ Heck

  Montego Bay will hold special memories for hundreds of Brits who have ventured to the Caribbean for some winter sun. It retains its relevance for me because it’s where I was offered the chance to become England coach. There are worse places to be told.

  Naturally, this is not a job that you plan for. After all, it carries a fair amount of exclusivity, being the only job of its type in the country and one not to be treated lightly. Additionally, it had never really occurred to me that I might even be in the running for it, until the day in January 1996 when I picked Michael Atherton up from the airport following England’s disappointing tour to South Africa.

  Atherton, with whom I enjoyed both a personal friendship and professional relationship as his coach at Lancashire, told me in no uncertain terms that I just had to get involved in reviving the national team’s fortunes. It was not a period in which I dwelt too much on future plans because the present needed plenty of attention – the breaking up of our family unit hit hard, particularly for our four children, and I felt responsible for the upset I had brought to their lives. It seems a lifetime ago now, but it would be wrong not to acknowledge it was wretchedly tough piecing things back together.

  When I returned to Lancashire as coach, I had been away what seemed like an age, and I think that helped. The young players I was asked to work with had an idea who I was but there was no baggage. I knew what playing for the club meant, and I wanted to transfer that into the team. I tried to make it our style that anyone who came to Old Trafford was going to find an aggressive team playing for the badge, the red rose. It was a policy that paid off, and my CV included the 1995 Benson & Hedges Cup final victory over Kent at Lord’s and fourth-placed finish in the County Championship that year. All this while losing as many as half a dozen players to England duty at any given time.

  My affection for the club meant that the move back to Old Trafford in the winter of 1992-93, to replace Alan Ormrod, and share team responsibilities with David Hughes, who became manager, was a happy one, a reflection that contrasted with the disillusionment I felt during some of my final seasons on the playing staff. As back then, one-day cricket proved our forte, and given the quality of players like Wasim Akram, Atherton, and John Crawley, not to mention 1992 World Cup finalist Neil Fairbrother and other highly under-rated performers such as Mike Watkinson, Peter Martin and Ian Austin, it was no wonder.

  I was so proud of this team, and when it didn’t get the credit I felt it deserved in defeating Kent in that B&H final, I flipped. For some reason, although we won, Kent’s Aravinda de Silva was selected for the man-of-the-match award, which might not have irked me but for the post-match press conference when the general theme appeared to be of his wonderful 112, and the fact you would never see a better one-day innings.

  As Lancashire coach, and a victorious Lancashire coach, all I wanted to focus on was how good we were. I was in the privileged position of knowing exactly how we had planned that game tactically and it worked to perfection. Yet all I was hearing was ‘Aravinda this, Aravinda that.’ It caused me to become a bit bristly. ‘He played really well, it was a wonderful innings,’ I agreed. ‘But when he came in they wanted under five runs per over. When he left they needed six and a half.’ That showed how we had done. Some will say that is bad sportsmanship. Not a bit of it. I was just
pushing my team, wanting them to gain recognition for executing their plans so efficiently. We controlled a terrific player even though he was in great touch, and when he chipped Austin into the deep on the leg side it was game over. Here was a sign that as a coach I would always be backing my team.

  That match, which resulted in a 35-run win, was always under control, aside perhaps for a very short period during which John Bower, our chief executive, left his convivial meet-and-greet in the Lancashire box to pay a visit to our dressing room. I caught sight of this red rose suit approaching when I was out sat on the balcony. I was in my office, in the zone, as it were, concentrating on what was unfolding in front of me.

  ‘I say coach, we have to get this chap out,’ he said.

  ‘John, you’re right on my flight path,’ I told him.

  ‘I see,’ he said, sober enough to realise it was time to turn on his heels.

  During this period Micky Stewart, the then England manager, used me on occasion as a pair of trained eyes to assess potential international players and even pitches that England were about to play on. Up until then, my only other link to the very top level of cricket was in developing players like Michael Vaughan for the English Schools side, and the likes of his Yorkshire colleague Anthony McGrath and Marcus Trescothick for Under-19 series. Soon, I was asked along to help at some full England get-togethers.

  The build-up to my appointment comprised a period of volatility in which Stewart, whose contrast in attitude to his captain David Gower was well documented, moved aside for Keith Fletcher, a quite brilliant county coach with Essex, who was subsequently removed himself in the aftermath of the 1994-95 tour of Australia.

  That led to England employing Raymond Illingworth in a joint role as team manager and chairman. Not to put too fine a point on it, Raymond ran English cricket on his own for a spell, albeit with John Barclay in support on the administration side. However, while things appeared fine on the surface – a 2-2 draw with West Indies was no bad result given the standard of opposition, and the following winter was no disaster either when looked upon from a statistical point of view as South Africa were deadlocked until the final Test in Cape Town – it concealed concern from at least one protagonist, Atherton, whose Herculean batting efforts alongside Jack Russell against the South Africans maintained the 0-0 score.